President Donald Trump delivered a remarkably unsuccessful, unimpactful State of the Union on Tuesday. This is according to live dial-meter research conducted for Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund by Democracy Corps among 108 Rising American Electorate (RAE) voters – the voters that will decide control of Congress in 2018.[1] Presidents usually receive a post-address sugar high in dial groups, but President Trump’s speech produced a particularly small rise in personal favorability and job performance – increases smaller than those observed in last year’s unsuccessful Joint Session to Congress. He failed to use this once-a-year opportunity to shift the momentum in the generic congressional ballot toward the GOP, which is the humblest expectation when a president has a devoted national audience for 90 minutes. In fact, he produced a 12-point shift to the Democrats among the white millennial participants in our dial-group. Critically, he increased the determination of white unmarried women, Latinos, and African Americans to vote in 2018.
